Property News · June 4, 2016

Author Joanna Briscoe: my fairytale shed


With a house that is impossible to extend, the cabin has proved to be a delight: a tiny study, a teenage escape, and a children’s sleepover retreatWhat is it about writers and huts? Dylan Thomas, Virginia Woolf, Roald Dahl all worked in them. Authors so often long for the solitude, the escape from distraction, the scent of wood sap in which to create. Yet, as a novelist, I can’t use this as my only excuse. I have simply, most of my adult life, longed for a hut of one’s own.In an ideal world, this would have been a treehouse, if not a hollow oak. But as the owner of a single spindly tree that is, in fact, a shrub, my notion of writing hidden in leaf shade and sleeping among owls belongs with the clouds and cuckoos. This folly, I know, is a form of regression, an eternal fantasy clearly fuelled in childhood by Arthur Rackham’s twisted bark, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s little houses, tales of rope ladders strung between branches, driftwood and tumbledown cabins up mountains. It’s the profoundly gorgeous feel, smell, almost taste of wood that gets to me. Patently, I have a problem. In fact, initially scornful of this enterprise, my daughter threatened to write an article for this magazine’s Experience series: My Mother Has Turned Into A Child. Despite this, I knew with all certainty that the family would use and love a wooden bolt hole at the end of the garden. Continue reading…

Source : theguardian.com
Read more…Author Joanna Briscoe: my fairytale shed

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